I ran across an outstanding post today by John Battelle reviewing Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.by Steven Johnson.

It’s one of my favourite books from the last couple of years, and Battelle does a great job of highlighting the key points in it. He also reminded me of a table that Johnson put in towards the end of the book. It looks at the genesis of what he thought were the most significant ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries. He then assessed whether they were developed in commercial firms or non-commercial organisations, and whether they were generated by individuals or by networks of people.

Here’s the table:

This illustrates several important points:

• It’s never either/or, it’s both/and. Are individuals or networks more innovative? Networks – there’s plenty of research to back this idea up. Nevertheless, individuals still generate plenty of big ideas. It’s the same with market vs. non-market – lots of great ideas come from both. More come from non-commercial environments.

  It’s really easy to argue black and white statements (“Only small firms innovate!” “No – only big ones do!”). But they’re never true. In order to support innovation, we need to look at these dichotomies and figure out which circumstances favour one approach over the other. And then we need to support both. This is true for market vs. non-market, for individuals vs. networks, for big firms vs. small firms.

  Black and white thinking is dangerous.

• Networks are a critically important source of great ideas. The lone inventor idea is still with us. Here is what Johnson says about networks:
  

  Ideas rise in crowds, as Poincaré said. They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection. So if we want to build environments that generate good ideas—whether those environments are in schools or corporations or governments or our own personal lives—we need to keep that history in mind, and not fall back on the easy assumptions that competitive markets are the only reliable source of good ideas. Yes, the market has been a great engine of innovation. But so has the reef.

  The second part of that quote leads to the next point:

• Non-market organisations are critical components of the innovation ecosystem. Many of the ideas that led to you being able to read this blog post came from non-market networks – the computer and the internet being chief among them. But just to illustrate the first point, smart phones, which aren’t in the table, came from a market network. Nevertheless, it’s important to understand how crucial non-market organisations are to generating big ideas.
• Most big ideas get turned into innovations by the market. Here is what Battelle says:
  

  This doesn’t mean those ideas don’t become the basis for commerce – quite the opposite in fact. But this is a book about how good ideas are created, not how they might be exploited. And we’d be well advised to pay attention to that as we consider how we organize our corporations, our governments, and ourselves – we have some stubborn problems to solve, and we’ll need a lot of good ideas if we’re going to solve them.

  Effectively connecting non-market organisations with market-based firms is one of the most important roles of government. In regions that innovate well, these two sectors interact more effectively than in less innovative regions.

Invention and innovation are two different things. However, we still need to start with a great idea to innovate well. Understanding how good ideas originate is an important part of doing this.

Are you creating something new or replacing something that’s already there? If you’re replacing, you need to do much different things than if you’re creating something new.

Every time you try to get your ideas to spread, you have to break connections. This is a lot harder if you’re trying to replace a deeply embedded idea.

Here’s how I’m thinking about it:

Replacement is like trying to knock out the red target in the middle of the diagram. The triangles might be suppliers, or complementary products, and the circles might be customers. The point is, the idea is really embedded.

If you’re trying to replace something, you have to come up with an idea that is MUCH better than the one you’re trying to replace. Here is how Stowe Boyd put it today talking about the new Microsoft Phone:

The iPhone was easily an order-of-magnitude better that the shit phones we all tolerated when it launched. Microsoft had years to come up with something awesome, and it’s ok. Which means death, today.

Replacement means being an order-of-magnitude better.

More academically, here is Clayton Christensen saying something similar in The Innovator’s Cookbook, and pretty good edited volume put together by Steven Johnson:

Even if innovators succeed in cramming disruptive technology into an existing market application, the incumbents typically win. Digital photography, online consumer banking, and hybrid-electric vehicles are examples of potentially disruptive technologies that were deployed in such a sustaining fashion. Billions were spent on these innovation to beat out already acceptable and habitual technology; little net growth resulted, as sales of the new products cannibalized sales of the old; and the industry leaders maintained their rule.

In short, replacement is very difficult. You have to stand out from the crowd, which is awfully hard, and it requires a quantum leap in functionality.

If you’re creating, you face a different set of problems. When you create something new, you don’t have any connections at all – you have to create them from nothing. This is tough.

However, the payoff to creating something new can be a lot higher than replacing. And there are some ideas that make this easier.

• Not all crazy ideas are great, but most great ideas are crazy: Fred Wilson says:
  

  When people ask me, “how do you know which companies and services are going to be the biggest successes?”, I usually tell them to look for the companies and services that are mocked and misunderstood. For some reason, that correlates highly with the biggest breakout successes.

  

• New ideas start out crappy: Greg Satell has a great interpretation of Christensen’s research, and he summarizes it by saying that disruptive innovations come through changing the basis of competition. To do this, you have to smart small, often with a new customer base, and with ideas that aren’t yet fully formed. This is completely different from how you approach replacement ideas.
• For new ideas, you can use things like the lean start-up methodology: this includes the concept of the minimum viable product. The basic idea here is that you get a working version of your idea out as quickly as possible, so that you can learn what works and what doesn’t. This requires clear thinking about metrics, and a good business model, which you test all the way through.

Think about the difference between coming up with something that is an order-of-magnitude better than what’s currently out there, versus putting out a minimum viable product and experimenting. They are completely different. They require different skills, different mindsets, and different methods for experimenting and testing your assumptions.

That is why you have to be clear about whether you’re creating or replacing.

Here’s a question for you: imagine that you have a package that has to be delivered to someone that you don’t know and you’ve never met that lives across the world from you – let’s say a particular lawyer in Antinanarivo, Madagascar. The only way to get it to them is to pass the package along to someone that you know on a first-name basis, and you ask them to do the same. The chain continues to grow using this method until the package eventually reaches the shop owner.

If this sounds familiar, it’s basically a version of the small-world experiment that Stanley Milgram ran in the 1960s. He had people from the Midwestern US trying to get letter to a banker in Boston. This experiment was the first test of the six degrees of separation idea – that any one of us is only six handshakes away from anyone else in the world.

But now, think about this: if you had the actual task of getting that package to Madagascar, who out or your friends and acquaintances would you actually send it to?

Do me a favour and take a minute to think about this and come up with an actual name.

Do you have a person in mind?

Good, now here’s a question – did you think of someone that is highly connected? Here’s what I mean – here are Facebook pictures for four people that I know (the stats are all from about 18 months ago):

At the time, the average number of connections that people had on Facebook was about 100. The for people are me, with 111 connections, and my friends Kate (75 connections), Siri (1320 connections) and Robert (2178 connections).

So the question about your choice in trying to get the package to Madagascar is this: did you pick someone that is less connected, like me or Kate, but which may have a particular connection to our target? Or did you pick someone that you know is highly connected, like Siri or Robert?

The story that we often hear about getting ideas to spread through networks is that the best way to do this is to find the influencers. Often, these are the superconnected people. This is how Ed Keller and Michael Berry describe it in their book The Influentials:

One in ten Americans tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy…. Few important trends reach the mainstream without passing through the Influentials in the early stages, and the Influentials can stop a would-be trend in its tracks.

Duncan Watts has been right in the middle of the development of social network analysis over the past 20 years or so, and he’s not so sure that this is how things actually work. In his new book Everything is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer), he describes an experiment that he put together with some colleagues to test how influential the Influentials were. They recreated the small world experiment, this time using email chains – they had over 20,000 chains trying to reach 18 targets in 13 different countries.

Here is how he describes the results:

We also asked people why they chose the next person in the chain, and here, too, we discovered little evidence of hubs or stars. Subjects in small-world experiments, it turns out, do not typically pass messages to their highest-status or most-connected friends. Instead, they pass them to people they think have something in common with the target, like geographic proximity or a similar occupation… Ordinary individuals, in other words, are just as capable of spaning critical divides between social and professional circles, between different nations, or between different neighborhoods, as exceptional people. When you want to get a message to a graduate student in Novosibirsk, Russia, for example, you don’t think about whom you know who has a lot of friends, or goes to lots of parties, or has connections in the White House. You think about whether you know any Russians. And if you don’t know any Russians, then maybe you know someone from Eastern Europe, or someone who has traveled to Eastern Europe, or has studied Russian, or who lives in part of your city that is known for its Eastern European immigrants.

If I were trying to get that package to Madagascar, I’d probably pick Siri to send it to next. Not because she’s highly connected (though she is), but out of the four of us in that picture, I know that she’s been to Africa most recently and that she has good connections there.

Which type of person did you pick?

These are important questions for anyone trying to get ideas to spread. They do spread through networks, and the structure of these networks is important. If we can’t target the Influentials to get our ideas to spread, what should we do?

Watts’ solution is to try using a Big Seed Strategy. Instead of using money and resources identifying and paying to get the Influentials to spread your idea, he suggests spreading the effort out across a wide range of “normal” people. In other words, his data suggests that rather than paying Kim Kardashian $10,000 to tweet your idea, you’d be better off paying 1,000 people with lower profiles $10 each.

This experiment was actually run once recently, when Connected, a book about how things spread through networks by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler was spontaneously promoted by Alyssa Milano to her 1.2 million twitter followers (read the full details here). Unfortunately for Christakis and Fowler, the extra publicity didn’t sell any more books.

Curious, they then had Tim O’Reilly (1.5 million followers) and Susannah Fox (4700 followers) send out tweets about the book as well. The one that produced the biggest bounce was Fox – and she was chosen because her followers were the ones that seemed most likely to be interested in the book.

It seems obvious that the best way to get ideas to spread is to find influential or highly-connected people to buy into the idea. However, this doesn’t seem to be the way that things work in practice. It’s a topic about which we still have much to learn. However, since networks are so critical to spreading ideas, it’s a good topic to keep up with – especially if you’re coming up with your own great new ideas.

Other resources:

There are all kinds of good resources on the importance of influence within networks – some good ones include:

• 3 Reasons “What” is More Important than “Who”: Valeria Maltoni writes extensively on the nature of influence, this post is just one good example.
• Why TV Won’t Die: The Power of Big Seed Marketing: Greg Satell has an excellent description of the Watts models, and how they apply to marketing.
• Spread of Influence in a Network: Valdis Krebs has done a lot of outstanding work teasing out how influence works inside of organizations – this post is just one example.
• The True Marketing Power of Facebook: Sociology Perspective: as with everyone else on this list, Michael Wu has written quite a bit about influence and networks. This post discusses how to use network ideas within social networks.

Innovation is the process of idea management. One of the critical steps to successful innovation is getting your idea to spread. Hugh MacLeod’s outstanding new book Evil Plans has a lot about how to get your ideas to spread more effectively. One of his tenets is that we should create random acts of traction.

There are two important parts to this idea. The first is that we need to create social objects that have traction – in other words, we are using a pull strategy. The second part is the random bit – we don’t know in advance which ideas actually will gain traction. So we need to experiment, and try out a lot of different ideas.

He starts to frame this idea by quoting Doc Searls:

Tell ya what. I’m fifty-seven years old, and I’ve been pushing large rocks for short distances up a lot of hills, for a long time. Now, with blogging, I get to roll snowballs down hills. Some don’t go very far. But some get pretty big once they start rolling.

See, each snowball grows as others link to the original idea, and add their own thoughts and ideas. By the time the snowball gets big enough to have some impact, it really isn’t my idea any more.

Anyway, at this point in my life I’d rather roll snowballs than push rocks.

Hugh has more great ideas per paragraph than nearly anyone writing these days (he’s in the same league as Charlie Stross) – here is how he follows that point up:

My friends, Dennis Howlett and James Governor, both technology consultants, certainly understand this. As they can only realistically execute on 10% of their ideas, they don’t seem to mind giving away the remaining 90% for free, via their blogs. If one of their free ideas gets “Random Acts of Traction”, it’s great PR for their businesses. It leads to conversations eventually. Conversations that eventually lead to paid gigs.

This only works, of course, if you can make your “snowballs” quickly and inexpensively enough. If you spend too much time worrying about it, you lose. If you try to control where the snowballs go after you’ve released them down the hill, you lose.

“Fail cheap. Fail fast. Fail often. Always make new mistakes.” -Esther Dyson. Words to live by. Exactly.

There are a ton of important ideas tucked in there. The bit about Howlett and Governor having too many ideas to execute themselves is important. It illustrates why we have to have a good process for selecting ideas.

The Dyson quote emphasises the importance of experimenting, and then learning from the ideas that don’t work.

But to me, the important point is that we need to send the snowballs out and see if they gain traction. This is a classic pull strategy. How do we execute this?

Here is how John Seeley Brown, John Hagel and Lang Davison describe their book about this process:

In many respects, The Power of Pull can be read as an attempt to reinstate the central role of socially embedded practice in driving knowledge creation and performance improvement relative to the recent emphasis in the management literature of process reengineering. In short, companies need to refocus technology innovation on providing tools to amplify the efforts of communities of practice to drive performance improvement

If you want to roll snowballs, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Your idea has to meet genuine needs. Pull strategies are based on ideas that meet real needs for people. If you are going to spread the idea through a community, people need to talk about it. They will only do this if you have created tangible value for them.
• Pull strategies rely on networks. Which strategy is best for doing this? This is still a controversial question. Many people advocate targeting people within the network that are highly influential. I prefer the “big seed” approach put forward by Duncan Watts. Greg Satell explains this idea:
  

  As I explained in an earlier post, he calls his approach Big Seed Marketing. His reasoning is that since influence is so hard to track, it is much better simply to start with a lot of reach (i.e. a big seed) and use social media to amplify it. It seems to me to be an incredibly reasonable and sound approach.

• You need to try out a lot of different ideas. Just as you seed your ideas as widely as possible, you try out as many as you can. As Hugh says, you need to roll a lot of snowballs down the hill.

Push strategies are attractive because when you are pushing your ideas, it always seems like you are active, and that you are in control of how successful the idea will be. However, this feeling of control is an illusion. Instead of betting everything on one big idea, we’re usually better off trying out a lot of smaller ones – especially if our environment is turbulent.

So I’m with Doc and Hugh – it’s better to be rolling snowballs than to be pushing rocks.